True/False Events

The Weird Wake-Up

The latest incarnation of our yearly field trip (farewell, Reel Gone Round-up!) brings us inside a rarely seen landmark, the Odd Fellows Temple. Here filmmaker Adam Curtis will host a hearty breakfast, provided by Café Berlin, followed by a special screening of It Felt Like a Kiss, which caused a major sensation at its multimedia premiere in Manchester, England, in 2009. The film stars, among others, the space chimp, Saddam Hussein, Lee Harvey Oswald and Doris Day — it makes for a "weird, wild ride of pop and paranoia." It's also a film about storytelling, specifically how ideas mediate reality, making it bearable to the human mind. Yet, although the stories may keep us sane, they all fail. Reality is ultimately unbearable, indecipherable. "Ideas are like stories about the world," he says, "and when the stories fail, reality becomes very difficult to understand. We sort of need stories, and they work for a time because they correspond to reality. And then, possibly like now, the stories don't work any longer."